Monday, May 21, 2007

Spectrum Version 3

Relive the glory days of the 80’s guiding Miner Willy through the ‘Solar Power Generator’, defeating Doomdark near the ‘Mountains of the Moon’, or just programming your next BASIC masterpiece.

Important upgrade instructions:The widget update will copy over the game file directory, so if you’ve added new games to an earlier version: Save the game files, then upgrade, then copy the games back.Download v3Older Versions are here

New in version 2.0- Sound- .TAP file support- Faster and smaller emulator- Kempston joystick support (use arrows and ctrl)

Pull those bedroom curtains even tighter together and ignore your mother calling you for dinner.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

LegalThe widget comes with a few legally provided games (see below).You can add more games by flipping over the widget, pressing ‘Open Game Snapshot Folder’ and adding your own games to that folder.

Only add files that you are legally allowed to - e.g. In some countries these can be games you have purchased. Copyright laws vary from country to county, so check them if you are unsure.Don't pirate games!

I believe the owners of the supplied games allow their games to be freely distributed (according to the web-site World of Spectrum). If you are the copyright owner of one of these games and you would like it removed from the widget distribution contact me and I will be happy to remove it.

The widget is based on the Qaop Java emulator - which has it’s own page here

Troubleshooting:Requires Java v5.0. If you are seeing a red 'X' in the corner, then Java isn't set up correctly. This is most probably fixed by:- Open Finder- Navigate to Applications->Utilities->Java->J2SE 5.0- Open Java Preferences- Ensure version is set to J2SE 5.0

Thank you for your fantastic emulator! I'm hoping that you didn't give up on it, because there is still room for a lot of improvements :)If I could choose I'd definitely love to see the support for the .TZX format and for the savestates.

Probably I'm asking for a feature that is impossible to add... but it would be *really cool* if your emulator could automatically save the state when you exit from the dashboard, and reload it automatically when you re-enter the dashboard... so anybody might play a game for some minutes, go back to work and restart to playing from the very point where he (or she) left some hours before.